Networking

The most difficult part of networking for me has been not knowing what to say or do. I thought of networking as socializing with people who have similar interests with the possibility of contacting them for help in future. In that light I didn't really know what to say, and didn't know how to filter to find those who either I could help, or those who could receive help from. I also didn't realize that individuals with experience are more than happy to help someone like me who has little experience or skills. Mckenzie Davies' lecture definitely clarified these things for me, and the 30 second pitch was definitely helpful. I've wandered through networking shows before, where business are all lined up with booths around the room, but now I feel I have more purpose in attending these events than to just get free handouts, haha.

Understanding and having a networking mentality would have been very helpful in my leadership role. I feel I could have assisted and been assisted by more people earlier on and would thereby have been more effective.

Although I feel that networking outside of my Operational sphere is temporarily useless since I will be serving a mission for the next two years, I now know which kinds of spheres to engage in and can network with far more direction and purpose. Now that I know what to say I really cannot think of any fears.

My Personal Code of Ethics

I want to be a successful leader in whatever tasks life gives me I. As an aspiring leader, my top eight values that will guide tough decisions are Freedom, Improvement, Integrity, Love, Principles, Work Ethic, Friends and Family. These values resonate deeply with me and I could never compromise them without feeling a sense of guilt, shame or loss. Therefore I will strive to make choices that are in harmony with these principles, and will stop and think about the consequences of my actions before I make decisions. My goal is that these values will eventually become apart of who I am, at which point I will no longer need to weigh the options but will already know what is most important to me.

Leading Change

1) Brother Ward's lecture helped me learn that risk, sacrifice and loneliness comes along with leading change, and though the these factors may be discouraging, they only enhance the needed commitment and courage of those who lead change. Additionally, I learned these costs of leading change help to ensure that, when long lasting changes occur, the changes are worthwhile. Conversely, it is encouraging and hopeful for leaders who are striving for higher ideals to know that truly good changes are worth the risk, sacrifice and loneliness that may be required.

2) For my leadership role I am going to implement what Brother Ward called, Championing Change. Right now, my team is undergoing a change in our original plans and as we've done this I've found the need to persuade them to adopt the new idea and have found that I can help them succeed in it by taking the risks myself and showing them how to do things. So far our team has been adjusting well, but this weekend we'll be taking a lot of action towards our new plan, so I guess I'll see how committed we really are.

3) In doing my presentation, I learned how important 3x5 cards are to help you stay organized and talk to the audience rather than using a piece of paper, losing your place and looking down to read from it. I also realized how important it is to memorize the outline of your speech as well as key transition phrases so the audience can follow along and so you aren't repetitive.

From the other guys I observed several different styles of presenting. I enjoyed Matt's because he seemed to always be driving to a point and was very focused in where he was going, and that made it easy for me to follow and get excited about what he was saying. I also liked Andrew's because he was very interesting and had an insightful presence which kept my attention even though it was technically a biography. Both of these guys were examples to me, and in the future I will definitely try to reflect the same kind of enthusiasm and presence that they had.

Although I haven't yet received an email about the prompt questions, I just thought I'd give this post a shot anyways.

Conflict Management:

1) What was your most important take away from Adrian Klemme's presentation?

I had two epiphanies during his lecture.

The first was something I already kind of knew, but until now hadn't realized in just this way. It came about when Adrian demonstrated how we perceive and pass judgement on things when we do not understand/have complete information in different situations (when the girls went up and rated the description of the guy). I realized that even though their initial judgements may have been assuming and harsh, there is no solution for those judgements not to be made, and thus it is important to communicate and inform people clearly. When he applied it to business settings I realized how important it is for individuals to understand the Why behind the What, and that as a leader I can really empower those I lead by helping them understand.

The second epiphany was just a connection I made to economics that had to do with Compromise. Like Adrian said, compromise is not when one person wins and one person loses, rather I realized that it is just like trade in economics where both parties benefit and are able to consume more than they would have otherwise (outside of their production possibilities frontier--technically speaking). So like trade, compromise is indeed a good thing both theoretically and in reality.

2) What are two examples, good or bad, of conflict management that you have experienced and/or seen?

Okay, so a good example of this took place in my dorm a while back. We were having trouble keeping the kitchen sink from filling up with dishes and even though there was a rule that said you must put away/load dirty dishes in the dish washer, the rule was rarely followed. Finally we'd had enough and decided to agree upon another rule. We reasoned that if the sink has nothing in it then it is clean, but if just one dish gets put in it then it becomes dirty and then no one feels guilty about adding to the mess; so, the new rule was that whoever's dishes were caught in the sink, that person had to unload the dishwasher until someone else was caught. Since then there has only been one perpetrator. Unfortunately, he's gotten tired of unloading the dishwasher and has stopped which is a problem; so, to avoid unnecessary conflict and to just be nice, I've started to unload it and gratefully the dishes continue to remain out of the sink :)

I've had many experiences with bad conflict management at work with my brother. Although we've learned how to deal with it now, we used to argue about the littlest things, never compromising or admitting that we were personally to blame. For some reason I just didn't let things go and he didn't either, and sometimes it was really embarrassing when we'd be openly arguing on the job and our customers would approach us and we'd have to try and act normal, haha. After that occurred a couple hundred times, we finally figured out that it was best to just admit faults or try things in different ways and that as we began doing so we both began to agree with each other more often an fighting each other completely stopped.

3) What are you going to do to apply the things you learned about conflict management to your leadership role?

At the moment I can't think of any conflict that my team has, we're pretty smooth functioning. That said, I will strive to prevent conflict by better informing my team mates about goals and project ideas so they can be empowered. I will also prepare myself to deal with conflict by remembering that there is usually a solution/compromise that can benefit everyone more than any one sided solution could, and that such a solution only needs to be discovered.

I hope this works for the blog post :)

Of the leaders you interacted with, which leader stood out to you? Why?

The leader that stood out to me was Caesar. I can't remember who acted him, but the guy who did must've been a history major or something because he knew a lot of facts. What I liked about Caesar's form of leadership was that he cared about the men he led into battle and established trust between them and himself. Also I think he was really good at leading with vision, and he was definitely good at seeing qualities in others and then giving them recognition and positions where they could lead and find fulfillment in helping him to a greater extent as well.

What did you learn about motivating others from researching your leader?

I was Mitt Romney, and as a business man he was very good at creating and organizing teams of people to accomplish things. He is a good inspirer, but also knows how to appropriately use money as a reward/motivator. Besides those unique qualities, he is just a guy who has done a lot of caring in his life and I think the greatest leaders/motivators are those who value and genuinely care about others.

What new element of motivating others will you apply in your leadership role? How?

Currently, the team I am leading is experiencing a lull in motivation, so this is ironically timely. I've even felt a loss of motivation because one of the projects that we invested a lot of time into wasn't as successful as we had hoped, and that took a lot out of us. Because that didn't go so well, we are actually looking for new options and haven't yet decided on anything. At the same time we are becoming a little stressed because of our impending deadline. Anyways, we just need to buckle down and accomplish our team goal.

After learning about how to motivate in this class as well as in my business classes, we need to just set a goal that we can accomplish in the next two weeks, along with a reward if we reach it. I will sit down with the team, we will talk about our past project, recognize people for working extra hard and also try to learn what we did wrong, but then we'll move on and I'll explain our goals and exactly what we will do to do to hit them. Then to get them excited about it we'll plan a pizza party or something if we make it. Then we're just going to go for it. I think this deadline for our reward will work well, because without it we will probably just let time pass without accomplishing anything. So yeah, I'll make it work :)

Decision Making

A cool decision making principle that was new to me was that because we never make choices outside of our alternatives, we should increase our alternatives by shooting high and broadening horizons. Although it seems obvious, I think a lot of the time close mindedness and a lack of creativity limits my available options and therefore realized outcomes. Having realized/learned this, the next time a weighty decisions arises I am going to make sure to take a couple steps back and think big so I can reduce my self-imposed limitations and find better courses of action.

The biggest problem I have as far as decision making goes involves me properly weighing costs and benefits when I have limited information. Usually when these situations occur, I pick whatever is most familiar, comfortable or easy, when perhaps I should choose some safe "risks" more often. For instance, one of the choices I will be deciding on for this weekend is wether to go to the campus dance, or instead go country dancing with my sister. I know how campus dances are, and they're fun, but I've never gone country dancing, I don't know much about it, and I don't want to miss out on a guaranteed fun dance.

I'll see what I decide, but the fact that something so inconsequential is one of my hard decisions just brought to my attention that for the most part I have already made most of my decisions as far as school and scheduling goes. Like we talked about in lab, I have already chosen to attend every class and get all homework assignments done, so I have reduced the amount of choices I would otherwise have to make on a day to day basis. I guess if it weren't for new decisions--even like which dance to go to--then life would be pretty boring and uneventful. But to answer the question (how I will combat my problem), a good criterion that I've picked up from my leadership book is to always consider your options against your priorities. Thus for my dance situation, since family is one of my lifelong priorities and because it is hard to get enough family time in here at college, I will go to the dance with my sister.

The hierarchy of decision making involvement was quite eye opening to me, and for my leadership role I am definitely going to start thinking of the different choices that need to be made in that light. Lately I have noticed that I've been seeking approval from everyone on the team for just about everything, but by having the hierarchy in mind and by considering the effect that my decisions will have on my teammates, I think I can be more efficient and effective in decision making, and thus a better leader for them.

My Mission Statement and how I Measure My Success

Real success for me is success with self. It’s not having things, but in having mastery--attaining victory within. Success for me is found in doing the things God would have me do and in becoming the person He knows and wants me to become.

So that's it, it's pretty broad, but to me it means that I can do absolutely anything I feel I should with the time I have been given. Some of the specific things I wanted to do in life is to be a teacher/mentor for others, I want to raise a wonderful family, I want to start and run many, many businesses, and eventually I feel like doing some public service something like that.

Time Management is so important as a leader because they must first be able to take care of themselves and must also be able to accomplish and coordinate lots of different things for others too. I know that in my leadership role (business team), if I hadn't been ahead in my classes I would not have been able to drop everything and go and work on our business. So time management really is important, and I wholly agree with trying spend the most time in quadrant one where you are doing what is important but not urgent (because you have planned ahead and have not allowed important things to become urgent).

To better manage my time I am going to make a chart with a list of the Important things that I need to do, and I will break those down into Urgent and Not Urgent categories so I can always be get done what I must and also plan ahead for the future. Another thing I want to do is to better track the time I spending studying and socializing, because as important as studying is, socializing and taking time for people is pretty important too.

An example of one of the weaknesses I have as a leader involves my perfectionism which leads to task micromanagement and sends a vibe that I lack the ability to delegate and trust my team mates. Although this weakness isn't to the point of ruining my teams, I often have to remember that certain details just don't matter as much as team building and cooperation, and actually I had to remind myself of that just yesterday during my business project.

Basically, what happened was that my team and I were baking 57 box cakes for our valentines day project, and as I stressed about keeping the workspace clean and about baking the cakes as quickly as possible, I feel like I was coarse at times and stepped on my teammates toes just to speed things up by a little bit. I understand that efficiency is really important, however it is not as important as the people on my team, and I felt bossy every once in a while when I told/suggested someone go do this or that, or when I didn't wait for them to catch up with me, and things like that. But I think it was most especially the way I led verbally that needs work, as well as my efficiency standards/expectations.

Like we talked about in class, perhaps I could overcome this weakness by working on my strength in leading by example. Further, I think I need to establish for myself and for the team, the expectations and goals we have before trying out something new, so that way we can all be on the same page and I won't have to push and prod them into doing things more quickly or more excellently.

In my group project for this class, the strengths of my team involve the ability each of us have to submit to the ideas and leadership of others and just work together as a team. We are all pretty responsible and committed and I do not feel anyone does more to lead than anyone else. From this strength we all benefit and our project is far more likely to succeed .

Team Progress

Currently I am working within two groups--my service project team for this class and my business team from my entrepreneurship class--and both groups are or have recently underwent the forming and storming stages.

So far I feel that forming has gone well in both groups. As fellow students, it's been nice that we all have similar purposes and aims for participating and succeeding together, and from that foundation getting to know each other and learning about each of our different strengths has been fairly easy. What has really helped me to get to know my teammates has been my respect and courtesy towards them, and just trying to accelerate the getting to know them process by looking for ways to complement and/or appreciate them. It's odd, but I probably would never have tried to get to know any of my teammates and would never have realized how excellent they are had we not been thrown at such projects together.

The storming stage occurred in both of my teams as well as we tossed around ideas for our projects. In the past, I know I've been far too critical of other's ideas, but having realized my error, I consciously decided to encourage every idea that was voiced and in the end we were able to agree on an idea that we all were excited about. However, storming wasn't over after that point because the next thing to do was to work out the small details. This stage is admittedly harder for me because I am a perfectionist and the little details and choices can seem to mean the world to me at times. I wouldn't say that I did great during our detail planning, however I think we were able to weather the storming because we had first laid a solid foundation during forming.

I've seen mainly one dysfunctions in my business team so far, that of avoidance of accountability. Particularly, there have been several assignments given out, however there has been a lack of progress reports and I find myself needing to ask how the assignments are coming along, which has been slightly difficult because the Fear of Conflict dysfunction seems to be at work as well. Anyways, I will solve this problem by turning the tables and teaching accountability by example; every time we get together for a meeting I will begin by reporting on the assignments I was supposed to do and then give everyone else an opportunity to do the same and be happy about what they accomplished for the team. If this method doesn't work I will explicitly inform everyone of the importance of accountability and then ask them to voluntarily report on their assignments in the future so we can achieve the benefits of accountability.

Wish me Luck :)

Leadership and Communication

As a leader communication is extremely important and since the lecture and class discussion I realized a couple things that I can work on to improve the way I communicate.

The most prevalent area involves the things I say in less formal settings when I do not feel I am leading anyone. Sometimes on these occasions I find myself saying things which are unbecoming of a leader and which exhibit disrespect for others, and though I am not too terrible, this is definitely an area in which I want to improve. The other thing I need to do is to be more courteous and understanding of others. Although I already knew about and generally followed this principle of communication, I didn't realize that I actually do struggle with this sometimes. Particularly, I noticed that I struggle in situations where my wants conflict with others' wants and I feel that I am right and that I just need to tell them the way things are (which really doesn't work--it's aggressive communication).

Anyways, I found Assertive and Empathetic communication to be best and will apply these two methods as I strive to improve my communication in the two areas explained above.

David

Alrighty. First of all I want to change my leadership role because this past week in my entrepreneurship class we were put into teams to start and run a business, and because I have the most business experience of my teammates and seeing as we'll be doing a lot of working together, it's a perfect place/opportunity for me to apply the things I learn about divine centered leadership. (But don't worry, I'll continue to be a leader in my FHE group, and in all other areas of my life as well; perhaps I'll occasionally write about some FHE stuff too if that's okay.)

Since the lab the person I was able to get to know was my peer mentor. I hadn't yet met her and I guess it's kind of funny that it I picked her for this project because she's technically supposed to get to know me, but I decided to really get to know her as well. Anyways, I met her in the hub, she was really nice, and we ended up talking for 45 minutes about me and my plans, and also about her. I found out that she's the only girl in her family out of four other boys, she goes rabbit hunting/exterminating with them on their farm, and she was recently married. Her major is psychology and she really wants to be a school counselor or a marriage consultant someday. I can't say that I got to know her really well, but I did make an effort.

As far as seeing people as they truly are--sons and daughters of God--I think the more I can do so the better I can lead because knowing who they are will help me love them and will also help me to treat them with respect. Although there are those who do not live as they should, by loving and respecting them for who they truly are, they are changed and lifted up to do the same. I think there's real power in this knowledge.

The way I will apply Divine Centered Leadership to my role in my business team, will be to try to really get to know my teammates and develop a love for them. Also, as leader I feel it will be very important to respect the ideas they have and the effort they put forth and to never demean or discount their work as we learn and do our best together.

What leadership roles do I have now?

-My current leadership roles include being a Big Brother, a Business Owner, a Student, an Assistant Ward Clerk, a Roommate, an FHE member and a Disciple of Christ.

What leadership qualities do I posses?

-As a leader I am good at knowing how people feel and at looking out and caring about those who get overlooked and left out. I am not overbearing in my opinions but rather pay attention to individual's suggestions as well as group consensus. If another person seems to have a situation under control I'm fine with letting them take care of it while I do what I can to comply with and assist them. Oftentimes I try to lead by example.

Of these roles, which will I focus on and apply class principles to?

-I want to be a better leader in my FHE group. Right now it lacks leadership even though we have a Ma and a Pa and though I'd just be a brother leader, or even Pa's assistant, I think the group is perfect for applying the things I learn in class. We meet at the least on a weekly basis and we all just want to be closer and more inclusive of everyone, so it's just going to take leadership to get some of my roommates over to see our sisters more often as well as for planning fun activities and such. I'm excited about it!